A Day In the Life of an Aspiring IT professional

7:30 am – Get home from working my “daily bread” job at the hotel.

7:31 am – Abandon thoughts of getting a quick nap at the site of both of my daughters up, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.

7:35 am – Make breakfast for Elder Spawn and a bottle for Wee Spawn

7:45 – Clean Elder Spawn’s breakfast off of Elder Spawn and surrounding furniture.

8:30 – Kiss wife goodbye as she heads to work. Help load kids in car.

8:31 – Take a nap and bathe simultaneously by falling asleep in the bathtub.

9:25 – Wake up freezing cold. Empty tub and refill with hot water.

9:45 – Get dressed and decide its time to go down to my internship

10:00 – Get distracted by deciding to check my email.

10:10 – Get tired of checking email and search YouTube for Music Videos.

10:30 – Locate car keys, wallet, cell phone and laptop bag.

10:35 – Order a medium coke and a double cheeseburger at McDonalds.

10:50 – Walk into the IT Coordinator’s office. Say “Good Morning” although I really mean, “I wish I was dead.” Ask “What’s broke?”

11:00 – Head over to the high school. Someone wants Outlook up and running.

11:05 – Library aide tracks me down to fix somthing wholly trivial.

11:10 – Go down to room 304 to change out a blown LCD monitor. The district saw no need in buying spares, so I replace it with a 15″ CRT. Teacher scowls. I tell him that a lot of users are going with the retro look on their desktop and that we’ll be phasing 8″ floppies and tape drives back in as well.

11:30 Go down to the middle school. Some schmuck has stolen the patch cable for computer 5D in the switch. Recommend that switch room be boobie trapped to prevent reoccurence.

11:50 – Spend about three hours putting Windows 98 on a bunch of machines that are going to be used as word processing machines. Decide to rename the system folder from WINDOWS to REDMOND, REDMONDWA, for the jollies of it.

 2:50 pm - Realize everyone else is going home, so I should too.

3:00 –  Stop at McDonalds. Another medium coke and TWO double cheeseburgers.

3:30 – Arrive home. Check email.

4:00 – Decide its time to go to bed

600 – Ignore all attempts to rouse me.

9:45 – Wake up

9:47 – Stumble into kitchen and eat dinner, which consists of cold leftovers, barbeque Grippos, or whatever I can throw together in my dazed state.

10:35 – Leave for the hotel where I work at the front desk.

11:00 – Arrive at work. Multitask between running a hotel, checking email, and browsing YouTube.

7:30 am – Repeat

Rebuilding with Windows 98

I spent two days last week rebuilding several machines down at the high school with Windows 98 and installing Office 2000 on them afterwards. This project has so far led me to several observations:

•  Windows 98, when stripped down to the bare essentials, can run extremely fast. How fast? I can cold boot one of the rebuilt machines in 15 seconds or less. That is without even messing with the configuration files.
• Despite all the extravagant features of newer office suites, they suck. Office 2000 loads in three seconds or less on 64 MB of RAM.
• FAT32 sucks. Large disk support meant something different in 1999 than it does today.
• A 550 Mhz Pentium III is a terrible thing to waste on Windows 98…
• These machines would be ideal Windows Eiger candidates

Why Windows 98 Matters Even Though It Shouldn’t

Although this is only my second week as an intern for the school system, I have already made several observations regarding the infrastructure behind the computer systems as well as the deployment of the same. Some of these observations I will keep to myself, as they concern best practices and I am not at liberty to publicly advertise any information about systems that will result in a security compromise of any kind.

With that said, I will make some remarks regarding my observation regarding the continued deployment of Windows 98 on many of the systems in the district. As support for Windows 98 ended on July 11, 2006, relying on this operating system for production systems has it’s drawbacks.

Why not upgrade to Windows 2000?

Windows 2000, officially known as NT 5.0, was intended for deployment in the enterprise environment. It was originally hoped that Windows Millennium  edition would serve as an able successor to 98 for the average user. Unfortunately, Millennium was 98-improved-worse and the costs of Windows 2000 often prohibitive for mass deployment by small school districts like the one I work for. The result was a reliance upon an operating system (Windows 98) that continued even after the support cycle was terminated.

Windows XP was meant to fill the enterprise, home, and educational markets and did so quite well.  Unfortunately, a lot of systems deployed by school districts could not support XP. Forced to rely on Windows 98, it was a matter of time before the other foot dropped.

Finding software that still runs on Windows 98 is becoming increasingly difficult. Internet Explorer 7, the most recent version of Microsoft’s flagship web browser will only run on Windows XP SP2 and above. Office XP was the last version of Office to support Windows 98. Without applications that support it, Windows 98 is becoming quickly obsolete. Yet we are servicing machines that short of resurrecting them of Linux boxes, have no future beyond Windows 98.

Ordering replacement hardware components for these machines is becoming an issue as well. Last week I replaced an old NIC in a Win 9x box. When I stopped at our local supplier to pick up the new NIC, I happened to read the system requirements for this card to work.

Windows 2000 SP4 and up.

Do not pass GO. Do not collect $200.

So what did we end up doing? We cannibalized a machine for parts and Googled for the driver. We lucked out and found a working NIC and the driver. It saved the district some money on a NIC, but what will happen when we can no longer cannibalize parts from other machines?

There are very few attractive solutions to this problem. Sure, the district can spend money on brand new PC’s that are preloaded with Windows Vista. Then we have no guarantees  that we won’t run into the same problems with software and hardware compatibility. The only difference this time is that it would be a forwards compatibility issue.

We could standardize on Windows XP Professional SP2/SP3 and hope

1) SP3 does not break apps in quantity like SP2
2) SP3 is not the end of the line for XP Pro after our investment.

We could also refurbish our current hardware with Linux and pretend that the learning curve and the lack of some niche applications for the educational market for Linux are non-issues.

Despite the technological advantages of Linux and the ability to deploy an operating system that still supports Pentium II and low-clock speed Pentium III machines, this is not an option. The number of calls we would get when a user tried to do something that required root access to do and the obligatory explanation of why we “can’t just give out the root password” alone makes this unfeasible.

The final option, despite the expense, would in the end be most satisfactory:

Buy a bunch of damn Macs. 

1012

That is the number of machines that I and a couple of my peers will be given to administer for the Lawrenceburg School Corporation. Twelve of them are servers running either Windows Server 2000 or 2003 while the workstations are running Windows XP and Windows 98. (The later might be ideal candidates to run Linux or BSD on )

My internship begins on August 13th when the 2007-08 school year begins. While it is an unpaid position, I have the ability to set my own hours and based on my telephone conversation with him this morning, my boss is a pretty decent guy.

I’m really looking forward to this new job as it will give me the opportunity to gain some practical experience and put my knowledge to good use. It will also enable me to acquire some much needed job experience to make my resume look a lot more attractive to future employers in the IT field.